The Big Business of Fairy Tales

Nike Takes Fire Again Over One of Its Athletes

South African runner, Oscar Pistorius, is being held by police after his girlfriend was shot dead at his house in Pretoria. WSJ's Devon Maylie brings us up-to-date with the latest on the double-amputee Olympic athlete. Photo: Getty Images

By

Matthew Futterman

Updated Feb. 15, 2013 12:01 a.m. ET

Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee runner from South Africa known as the "blade runner" for the prosthetic feet he wears in competition, has appeared in many advertisements for Nike.NKE0.18%

Oscar Pistorius, the South African running star charged with murder, is the latest of several Nike-sponsored stars to fall from grace. Does Nike need to pivot on its marketing? Matthew Futterman joins Markets Hub. Photo: Getty Images.

One shows him uncoiling from a start with the tag line, "I am the bullet in the chamber." Another contains images of the best of South Africa's athletes with a voice-over that pronounces, "My body is my weapon…This is my weapon, this is how I fight."

ENLARGE

Oscar Pistorius
Getty Images

Pistorius will have a bail hearing on Friday, a police spokesman said, after being charged in the shooting death of his girlfriend, the fashion model Reeva Steenkamp.

Already, the shoe company's sponsorship deal with the athlete, and the unfortunate content of those ads, have prompted a lot of uncomfortable questions for the Oregon-based sports and apparel giant. In a statement Thursday, Nike offered condolences "to all families concerned following this tragic incident. As it is a police matter, Nike will not comment further."

In an interview after the arrest Thursday, Pistorius's agent, Peet van Zyl, declined to comment on the case. He said he was busy organizing legal and public-relations teams. But van Zyl said he had already connected with his Nike contact in South Africa and would soon be reaching out to the company's top executives. "I will be doing that later tonight," he said.

Conversations like that one have become somewhat routine at Nike over the past decade. Anyone who has had access to a newspaper knows this isn't the first time some member of the company's stable of galactic star sports figures has been a target of serious allegations.

Among other Nike-sponsored athletes, NFL quarterback Michael Vick pleaded guilty in 2007 to federal dogfighting charges and served time in prison. Marion Jones went to jail after being convicted of lying to a grand jury about her use of performance-enhancing drugs. Tiger Woods apologized publicly for his involvement in a string of highly publicized extramarital affairs. Former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno was fired by the school after reports emerged about the behavior of his former assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky. Last year, the company dropped Lance Armstrong after doping authorities stripped him of his Tour de France titles.

Through it all, the company has stayed a course centered on inspiration rather than product. Pistorius, after all, doesn't even wear shoes.

In the past it has been noted that when a Nike athlete falls to earth, the company's fortunes continue to soar. Nike revenues have more than doubled in the past decade, from $10.7 billion in 2003. Nike maintains nearly 60% market share in running and nearly 90% in basketball, according to footwear consultancy SportsOneSource. "Athletes are human and they do make mistakes but we still believe they inspire people and continue to do so every day," said Nike spokeswoman Mary Remuzzi.

Since 1984, when Nike boldly decided to offer nearly all of its basketball marketing budget to a single player—Michael Jordan— and build a marketing campaign around him, the company has never wavered in the approach. "It's the heritage to their entire marketing strategy over three decades," said Paul Swangard, the director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon.

Trailblazing Athlete's Career

Born without fibulas in both legs, South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius blazed a trail as a Paralympic athlete before taking part in the able-bodied Olympics in London last year. A look back at his eventful career. WSJ

But can Nike's strategy succeed indefinitely as the company veers from one catastrophe to the next?

One by one, as major stars are unmasked, there is a growing sense that the practice of mythmaking may have to stop. There's a feeling that at some point, shame will set in. Embarrassment will do its job and customers will go elsewhere. "In a sense, this is the biggest lesson to learn: that there really aren't heroes," said Jason Richardson, a hurdler who won a silver medal in London. "We're too quick to elevate people into these hero roles and they're not allowed to be human."

There's a perception that Nike has somehow changed the rules of athletic success in a crass or craven way. Some accuse the company of commoditizing fame. The size of one's Nike contract is often seen as another form of scorekeeping for the modern athlete, alongside things like the size of their contracts or the number of Twitter followers they have.

The thing about Nike that rarely gets acknowledged is that it doesn't sell shoes, or even athletes, as much as it buys and sells stories, narratives, fairy tales. They aren't a shoe company as much as a giant abstraction—a condition of the aspirational mind.

WSJ's Joshua Robinson looks at the long struggle the South African athlete faced in being able to compete with able-bodied runners at last summer's Olympics in London. Photo: Getty Images

In Nike's pantheon, success isn't merely about winning. It isn't about the traditional forms of scorekeeping in sports—things like trophies collected, points scored, bouts won, consecutive games played, or years served. What Nike said, when it signed Michael Jordan, is that the ultimate measure of any competitor is something else entirely: How irresistible his story is. Jordan, the greatest basketball player ever, claims to have been cut from a high-school team.

Nike doesn't make racing bikes. It signed Armstrong because he had survived cancer and come back to win the most grueling race in the world. It didn't sell golf clubs when it signed Tiger Woods. Nike brought him aboard because he was a potentially transformative star who had the ability to break down racial barriers in the world's most staid sport.

If stories are the currency of Nike's business, Pistorius is the equivalent of a blank check. He's the kid who lost his lower legs before he could walk and was told he would never be able to play sports. He battled for the right to race with the fastest men in the world on a pair of carbon-fiber prostheses. He's the rare athlete who doesn't just challenge our notions of fitness, he forces us to reconsider the definition of disability.

Pistorius fits perfectly into Nike's view of the world: That the most powerful thing one can sell isn't comfortable, stylish performance sportswear, it's the concept of possibility.

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